CDSC Computational Social Science Workshop (Fall 2022)
The CDSC Computational Social Science Workshop in Fall 2022 is a series of project-based workshops being held at the University of Washington for anyone interested in learning how to use programming and data science tools to ask and answer questions about online communities like Wikipedia, Twitter, free and open source software, and civic media. If taken with a faculty supervisor, the workshop is intended to be suitable for university-level credit.
The Fall 2022 workshop will take place:
- Tuesdays, 12-2pm Pacific time. The first hour will be interactive lecture and discussion, and the second hour devoted to questions, co-working, and 1-on-1 discussion
- In-Person for UW folks, on Jitsi for folks elsewhere.
This workshop is for people with absolutely no previous programming experience who want to use data to answer questions about the social world.
The goal is that, after the workshop, participants will be able to use data to produce numbers, hypothesis tests, tables, and graphical visualizations to answer questions like:
- Are new contributors in Wikipedia this year sticking around longer or contributing more than people who joined last year?
- Who are the most active or influential users of a particular Twitter hashtag?
- Are people who join through a Wikipedia outreach event staying involved? How do they compare to people who decide to join the project outside of the event?
The workshop is entirely based on the curriculum used for the Computational Data Science Workshops.
Schedule
There will be a mandatory evening setup session 6:00-9:00pm on Friday January 17 and three workshops held from 9:45am-4pm on three Saturdays (January 18 and February 1 and 15). Each Saturday session will involve a period for lecture and technical demonstrations in the morning. This will be followed by a lunch graciously provided by the eScience Institute at UW. The rest of the day will be followed by group work on programming and data science projects supported by more experienced mentors.
All sessions are interactive and involve you programming on your own and on your own laptop. Everybody attending should bring a laptop and a power cord so that they don't run out of battery.
Session 0: Setup and Programming Tutorial (Friday January 17 evening)
Come to the Communications Building (CMU) 104 between 6:00 and 9:00pm. It's OK if you come a little late but you'll want to have as much time as you can to finish the setup and self-directed assignments so come as close to 6:00pm as you can. Most people will finish early but some people will definitely need the full 3 hours. It's hard to know in advance where problems will crop up so please come on time even if you are confident.
- Time: 6-9pm
- Location: Communications Building (CMU) 104
- Objectives: During this session, mentors will help you:
- set up your development environment
- learn how to write and execute Python code in a Jupyter Notebook
- learn about printing and using Python as a calculator
Note: Because we expect to hit the ground running on our first full day, we will meet to help participants get software installed and to work through a self-guided tutorial that will help ensure that everyone has the skills and vocabulary to start programming and learning when we meet the following morning.
Session 1: Introduction to Programming (January 18)
Come to Savery Hall (SAV) 260 by 9:45am. Plan to be on UW campus by 9:45am. You will need time to get settled and setup. We will start lecturing promptly at 10am. There will be coffee!
- Time: 9:45am-4pm
- Location: Savery Hall (SAV)
- Schedule
- Morning, 10am-12:20 (SAV 260): A 2.5 hour lecture-based introduction to the Python programming language
- Lunch, 12:20-1pm (Savery Hall in the downstairs hallway): We'll provide lunch (pizza!)
- Afternoon, 1pm-3:30pm (SAV 130, 137, 138, 156): Python practice through short projects (see below) on a variety of fun and practical topics:
- Wrap-up, 3:30pm-4pm (SAV 260): Wrap-up, next steps, and upcoming opportunities for learning and practicing Python
- Objectives: Programming is an essential tool for data science and is useful for solving many other problems. The goal of this session will be to introduce programming in the Python programming language. Each participant will leave having solved a real problem and will have built their first real programming project.
Session 2: Importing Data from web APIs (February 1)
Come to Savery Hall (SAV) 260 by 9:45am. You will need time to get settled and setup. We will start lecturing promptly at 10am. There will be coffee!
- Time: 9:45am-4pm
- Location: Savery Hall (SAV)
- Schedule:
- Morning: 10am-12:20 (SAV 260): A 2.5 hour lecture-based introduction to the web programming and APIs
- Lunch: 12:20-1pm (Savery Hall downstairs hallway): We'll provide lunch (TBD)
- Afternoon: 1pm-3:30pm (SAV 130, 137, 138, 156): Web API practice through short projects (see below) on a variety of fun and practical topics:
- Wikipedia
- Yelp - Get a Yelp API Key ahead of time so you're ready to go.
- Wrap-up: 3:30pm-4pm: Wrap-up, next steps, and upcoming opportunities for learning and practicing Python
- Objectives: An important step in doing data science is collecting data. The goal of this session will be to teach participants how to get data from the public application programming interfaces ("APIs") common to many social media and online communities. Although we will use the APIs provided by Wikipedia, Twitter, and Socrata in the session, the principles and techniques are common to many other online communities.
- An outline for the lecture can be found here and a list of potential projects for the afternoon session are listed below:
Important Note: If you plan to attend the Twitter afternoon session, you need to complete the Twitter authentication setup before the afternoon setup on Saturday. If you plan to complete the Yelp session, you need to complete the Yelp authentication setup instructions. There's no promise that we will be running these sessions this weekend unless there is demand but you will need to have done these if you want to attend the session.
Session 3: Data Analysis and Visualization (February 15)
Come to Savery Hall (SAV) 260 by 9:45am. You will need time to get settled and setup. We will start lecturing promptly at 10am. There will be coffee!
- Time: 9:45am-4pm
- Location: Savery Hall (SAV) 260
- Schedule:
- Morning, 10am-12:20 (SAV 260): 2.5 hour interactive lecture
- Lunch, 12:20-1pm (TBD): We'll provide lunch (Bahm mi from Saigon Deli)
- Afternoon, 1pm-3:30pm (SAV 130, 137, 138, 156): Web API practice through independent projects
- Visualization and analysis of civic data from data.seattle.gov
- Review of Week 1 and Week 2
- Independent projects working on issues of your choosing!
- Wrap-up, 3:30-4pm
- Objectives: The goal of data science is to use data to answer questions. In our final session, we will use the Python skills we learned in the first session and the datasets we've created in the second to ask and answer common questions about online and offline communities. We will focus on learning how to generate visualizations, create summary statistics, and test hypotheses.
Venue and Logistics
What to bring
- a laptop
- for Session 0 make sure that you have about 1GB of space free so you can install Python and all the necessary other software
- for Sessions 1-3 bring your laptop with Python set up
- a power cord
- a sense of adventure!
